“Doctor Sleep,” Stephen King's highly anticipated sequel to “The Shining,” is an ambitious, heartfelt epic about alcoholism, painful memories and making final amends. It's a tender novel, more haunting than terrifying and more spiritual than ghastly.

King has always struck me as a spiritual writer; his stories seem to stem from a drive to explore certain mysteries of the universe — life and death, and questions about the great beyond. Whether it's telekinetic teenagers (“Carrie”), the dead returning to life (“Pet Semetary”), or an apocalyptic epidemic (“The Stand”), the scares in his books are formed as much by wonder and awe as they are by terror.

In “Doctor Sleep,” King looks with a steady, compassionate gaze at what happened to little Danny Torrance of the Overlook Hotel now that he is all grown up. With both his parents dead and no known family ties, Dan is alone in the world. He has inherited his father's alcoholism and some of his violent temper. Living his life from drink to drink, Dan has transformed into a shell of a man.

Of course, he still has the shining, an extrasensory perception that allows him to see and hear things that ordinary people cannot. It is precisely when he sobers up and starts to pull his life together that his gifts come most in handy. He spends the rest of the novel trying to atone for his faults. He attends AA meetings. He makes new friends. He gets a job. Working as an orderly in a small town in New Hampshire, Dan uses his gift to help his patients die without fear, earning him the nickname Doctor Sleep.

In the next town over, a little girl named Abra has been born with shining powers of her own. She shares a special connection with Dan, but she is also the target of a fearsome cult of paranormals who hunt down children who shine and torture them to death, feeding off their psychic energy — their “steam” — like vampires do blood.

What is King up to here? He'd probably be the first to say that he mostly just wants to tell a good story. That's one of the reasons why his body of work readily soaks into our imaginations and has become a part of the popular culture: He puts up no frills and no pretensions, just a good, strong story, and he has a lot of fun with the possibilities.

“Doctor Sleep” has an absurd, kamikaze plot and to go into it any further would only make it sound silly, but then, don't all of King's plots sound silly when in capsule summary format? The summing up doesn't do it justice. Suffice it to say the plot involves astral projections and telepathic communication. Conversations between characters are held in italic internal dialogue format. It's kind of fascinating in a loopy sort of way. And it's always fun.

And yet, you sense that King is on to something more, something deeper and meaningful. When Dan takes the young Abra under his protection, he is living up to the kind of fatherhood that Jack Torrance never could. Where in “The Shining” you saw everything drain out of a man, here you see one build himself up.

The integrity that King bestows on Dan is touching, and you're reminded how thrillingly moving it can be to read about good people struggling to do good in the world.

There is a passage in the book where Dan, after years of sobriety and AA meetings and struggle, feels a strong desire — a burning need — for a drink. He needs to drown out the guilt, the memories, the ghosts. It worked for his dad: Jack never had to face the ghosts as Dan has. It would be so easy. One drink. And more will follow. But he walks away to face the ghosts once and for all.

Gerard Martinez, a San Antonio writer, can be reached at martinez_gerard@hotmail.com.